No man's land

There's a spot in the middle of Nose Hill Park that's so far away from the edges of the hill, that you can't see them. Standing in the middle, right about where that arrow is on the image, you can imagine yourself in the middle of a deserted prairie landscape. All you can see in a 360 degree turn, is a handful of homes on the hill across from you in Edgemont and the very top of the Telus building downtown (which you could convince yourself was a new age grain elevator, or at least the top third of it).

Very strange to know you're in the middle of a city of a million people and can't see the evidence of it.

How much fun you can have when there's no pressure to win

Youngest daughter plays on a community soccer team while middle daughter plays on a travel team. The difference between the two leagues was crystal clear on Tuesday night's games.

Youngest daughter's community game started ten minutes late because the opposing team was trying to get enough players to avoid forfeiting. They didn't, so daughter's team won by default. But they decided to play anyways, matching team numbers so that they fielded 6, then 7 player teams.

Knowing there was no pressure to win, they had a great time, clearly enjoying the game. And while they were a little less competitive than usual, they still worked the field. They just enjoyed it at the same time.

Older daughter's travel team game was a very different experience. They are still playing to determine their seeding, so it was serious. After it was all over, she was annoyed at some of her teammates actions, and the whole game was played far more seriously than the earlier one.

It wasn't quite as serious as the one going on behind us on the next field - two adult teams - where the ref finally had to threaten the coach with a yellow card to get him to stop questioning the linesman's calls. But the girls' game was still so much more serious than the earlier game where there was no pressure to win.

As a parent, I wish there was a way to get the girls to relax and play all their games like the score doesn't count. They have so much more fun that way!

Editing oneself

I've been working on editing a paper I'm trying to write over the last few weeks and finding it a fairly daunting task. Part of the problem is that I'm fairly significantly changing something I've already written (but which had a very different purpose in mind). It almost makes me wish I'd started from scratch instead.

But one of the most interesting things I'm coming to realize with this extended editing session is that I'm a bit scatter-brained. What I mean is, I find that sentences, or even whole sections, are well constructed and usable, but that I'm spending a lot of time rearranging whole paragraphs, or moving sentences around within them, to clarify what I'm trying to say.

So it seems I'm good at writing down an idea, but pretty bad at figuring out in what order those ideas should be placed. Seems a bit scatter-brained to me.

Constructions of knowledge

Having recently switched jobs from a classroom to an elearning environment, has gotten me thinking about the way knowledge is constructed in each of these places. It seems to me there are two models on which knowledge acquisition and dissemination are constructed: the "expert" model and the "searcher" model.

In the classroom, the traditional, and still the most prevalent model is what I would call an "expert" model. An instructor, expert in the subject, shares his or her knowledge with a group of assembled learners. Experts in this case have spent years and years accumulating their knowledge, which they are able to access at any time.

We all know examples of really fascinating instructors who can pull information out of their head on almost any aspect of their subject. These experts rarely seem to require lecture notes to remember things, and can answer any question asked on the topic (and some outside the topic at hand!) with a narrative that incorporates the question into a larger framework and seamlessly integrates into the lecture topic of the day.

These experts are afforded some respect for their knowledge. They are sought out by students (even if just by the fact that the educational institute tells the students to go to their class), and by their peers and recognized for their knowledge. They often have guaranteed jobs or are sought out by other educators, researchers, new scholars, or even by journalists looking for an "expert" news bite for a story.

Such experts don't only exist in educational institutions. We can all think of such experts that we've encountered elsewhere, whether they are sports statistic fanatics, collectors, or just amateur scholars of some subject that they care deeply about.

And that's one thing both professional and amateaur experts have (or are at least imagined to have): a passion for the subject of which they are an expert. This passion is understandably necessary. The process of becoming a recognized expert usually requires years of schooling, or at minimum years and years of study to accumulate that knowledge that they carry around in their head all the time.

These experts might use computers, and file cabinets and notes of various sorts to help them remember and locate information, but just through their long and extensive acquaintance with the subject matter, most of it is located right at their fingertips whenever they want: it's encoded in their memories and accessible whenever someone asks them a question.

In elearning, we regularly talk about SMEs - Subject Matter Experts - who provide this service to users of elearning. They are often this first kind of "expert" and they provide what they know to an instructional designer, or content manager, who then shapes the information for delivery in an electronic environment. So in some ways in elearning, the function of the instructor at the front of the classroom is split, with the SME providing the content, while the instructional designer provides the delivery mechanism.

Although not a universal feature of elearning, one of the elements we frequently include in our programs are links to other web resources for learners who wish to know more about a given subject. These links lead them into the world wide web, from which they can continue to follow links, find new keywords and use those to conduct their own searches, or follow threads until they lead to new learning experiences.

This ability to navigate through the internet to learn is something that we as educators are beginning to recognize as a valuable skill, and are beginning to teach to students. This is what I would call the "searcher" model of knowledge. Knowledge is out there, and the smartest students will be the ones who will be able to use the resources they have at their disposal to search and find the information they need.

In other words, you don't have to be an expert, you just need to know where to find one on the internet. The sentiment behind this model then becomes "Who needs to spend years and years learning a subject when someone else out there already knows all this?" Now, from a certain perspective, the "searcher" model of knowledge is an efficient one, and certainly has a value for students who are beginning to enter a particular field. We often expect students to demonstrate a familiarity with the material in the field that they can only gain by rapidly acquiring it from other sources i.e. experts.

But the "searcher" model of knowledge construction can only carry a person so far. The adage about the student exceeding the teacher's knowledge strikes me as the kind of goal scholars-in-training should aspire to. If the only thing you ever do is search out the information that others have created (and posted/published) then the advance of knowledge will never occur.

I really don't think that knowing where to find information on the internet will ever produce new insights. I believe that moving beyond what others have done requires the kind of immersion within the subject matter that the expert attains. The expert becomes so immersed in her or his subject that it becomes an intimate part of life - not just the life of the study or the computer screen - but spilling over into other parts of life. The subject becomes something you see absolutely everywhere. That's what it means to be an expert. Because everything is there in your brain, not just at your fingertips, it infiltrates other parts of your life, emerging when you least expect it to connect seemingly disparate elements to create new insights.

Now, some of that last paragraph was conjecture - perhaps even wishful thinking. As I aspire to become an expert in a field, I'm certainly not at the point where my subject matter is second nature. I still rely heavily on EndNote to remind me what I've read, and I usually don't fully integrate what I've read with everything else that's filling up my brain until I've written about it. But I am starting to see the beginnings of this kind of expertise - where my subject matter begins to infiltrate every aspect of my life, leading me to look at everyday things around me in a different way. (If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might also be getting that sense with all these technology-related posts lately.)

What got me thinking about these two different models was a movie I watched on Victoria Day, you know, the unofficial first day of summer in these parts when we had that snow? Yeah, that day... (though at least is wasn't as bad as Thursday's record breaking dump!)

I was watching National Treasure, a movie I'd seen before and not been particularly impressed with, but the snow and holiday conspired to keep me from getting off the couch and doing something else.... I suppose it wasn't all bad 'cause it got me thinking about this post at least...

But, back to the movie. If you remember the plot, Nicholas Cage's character, Ben, is searching clues for a national treasure. He has spent his whole life tracking down clue after clue (and his father spent his life before that doing the same). In the course of all this searching, he has a acquired a lot of information, which he shares with other characters in the film, particularly his young sidekick who apparently knows none of it, which gives Ben the (annoying) opportunity to give a mini history lesson at every plot point of the movie. (Yeah, that's one of the things that I didn't like about the movie...) His arch rival in this search for the treasure is Sean Bean's character, Ian, who has oodles and oodles of money and is usually just one step behind Ben.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. Ben's spent his life acquiring the knowledge of the treasure, following an expert model of knowledge construction, while Ian uses money, the internet (his henchmen carry a wireless laptop everywhere they go), and Ben's trailblazing path, to follow - a searcher model.

The difference between the two models is nicely demonstrated in a scene where Ben figures out that the numbered code he found refers to individual letters contained within a series of correspondences housed in a museum. They send a boy into the museum with the code to pick out each of the letters, which the sidekick puts together to form a sentence, which is the next clue in the search. Ben and his buddies then head to the next clue.

Ian meanwhile has caught up to them and clues in that the kid is working for Ben. He interrogates the kid, but the kid only has the last word of the message - Stow. Ian punches "Stow" and "Declaration of Independence" into a search engine and quickly finds that Stow is one of the creators of the liberty bell (btw, after two hits from the movie, you'll get the same results). Ian arrives at the bell just after Ben and his friends have. Ben knew that Stow and Pass made the bell because he's immersed in U.S. history, but all Ian had to do was look it up on the internet.

Two different forms of knowledge. Notice how Ian's form relies on clues from an expert however. Without knowing WHAT to look for, he would never find it.

So you can guess who wins in the end. Yep, the expert. Who knows a thing or two that the searcher can't find on the internet, or even know to look for. And who employs a bit of misdirection that the searcher doesn't pick up on, because he's not expert enough to know that it's a misdirection (I could go on a rant about misinformation on the internet, but that's a whole other topic).

Intentionality

I've been reading Rodney Brooks' Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us, which has some fascinating stories of the work he and other scientists at MIT have been doing with robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

One project in particular, is Cynthia Breazeal's Kismet. Kismet is a robot modelled on a developing infant. It is equipped with vision and speech, but like an infant, it's speech is babble and doesn't make sense (like an infant, it is capable of forming phonemes of English, it just doesn't string them together into recognizable words).

What does make sense when Kismet interacts with other people is the way it carries on a conversation. It responds when someone speaks to it, looks them in the face, will turn its attention to objects pointed to, takes turns "talking" with others, and generally acts in a lot of ways like an infant would.

In fact, the way that people talk to it is very much like how we talk to infants or small children, especially if we don't know them and are first encountering them. This video of a conversation between Kismet and a volunteer is especially interesting, and if you ignore that Kismet says nothing recognizable. It really does sound like Rich (the volunteer) is trying to talk to a child, which is what Kismet acts like in reality.

Very interesting.

Sunny days!

What perfect weather for a ride in a convertible... and I have one now!

We've been having some really nice weather - too bad it won't last - but for now, it's sunshine all the way. Makes me want to sit on a patio soaking it up, not working, but work before play, right?

I've gotta say I am delighted with our new car. I know new cars are always a fun novelty when you first get them, but this one's just fun too! I've been having a great time driving it and been having a great time at the gas pump too! At 60mpg and Diesel sitting at 20 cents/l less than gas, it costs me pennies to get around. Gotta love that.

One of the strangest things about this car is the responses of other drivers on the road. Although there are several thousand in the area, I've only seen three others in our little city on the prairie. Big city on the prairie has far more, but even there, people can't help but comment. Some people haven't seen one close up and just want a peek, but some are even more curious. I had a chat with a guy outside Timmy's the other day when he stopped to ask if I liked my car as I was climbing back in after getting my coffee.


I've had one really grouchy guy in a big truck think I was taking up too much space... but he was obviously having a bad day. Taking up space is certainly something this car doesn't do... in fact, our garage is so small that only a mini like it allows us to fit a second car in the garage.

Even having a flat tire is an amusing experience in the Smart car. Obviously, it's too small to carry a spare. I have storage room - enough for a couple of lawn chairs and a picnic basket, or a week's worth of groceries - but storage space is at a premium. So instead of carrying a spare, I carry that tire repair goop and a mini-compressor that runs off the cigarette lighter.

I got to try it out too - came back from one of youngest daughter's soccer games to find the tire flat. So I had to "treat" it right there on the side of the road. Took no longer than changing a regular tire, and there wasn't the grunting and groaning that sometimes accompanies the loosening of the lugnuts. It was actually kinda cool. Thank god they were able to repair the tire rather than replace it though - having a Mercedes import is costly - the tires are made in France after all, so they cost a lot more than a regular tire!

But cruising with the top down on a sunny day, the cost of tires fades into the background and the savings at the pump more than make up for any extra costs for parts. Gotta say, I'm loving this funny looking little car!

Changing holidays

Funny how holidays change as you move through different times in your life. Like Mother's Day for example.

When you're a kid, you make mom a gift, and later on buy her something with your allowance, and all you can think about is how cool the item is - you do very little thinking about what she'd like. Then later as you get older, you start to put some thought into it, but sometimes you realize you have no idea what mom wants because you still can't see her as not-mom, as a person with interests and tastes.

Hopefully at some point you figure it out and she at least gets something she wants from you.

Then if you're female, you might end up a mother yourself. That changes the whole holiday. At first, your children's father is the one orchestrating everything, and it's this stage of the game that contemporary Mother's Day ads, newspaper articles, and feel-good (but sappy, poorly written) poems seem to imagine is the only way that Mother's Day gets celebrated.

As this Mother's Day approached, that was the message I got - that if you didn't have a toddler who ran you ragged all day long but then looked like a little angels after they fell asleep, then the holiday wasn't quite for you.

Having teenagers who keep you up half the night worrying doesn't work as good on cute Mother's Day cards... unless they're humorous ones I suppose.

Over the years, I've wanted to boycott the holiday because it seems like the enforced interaction of the whole family together just brought out the worst in the kids and a fight would break out, ruining dinner etc.

But this year, I got just what I wanted, and I don't think they make a Hallmark card for this one: a dinner with all my kids together and NO fighting. Perfect!

Insensitive dead matter

What do zombies and robots have in common?

Sounds like a bad riddle, but I think it's an interesting question. Perhaps I'm just a bit dense to not have thought about the commonalities before, but I hadn't really thought of zombies and robots performing any kind of similar function. I've never really made the connection between the two entities before, but reading this passage about robots got me thinking about it:

"Thoughtful machinery violates the equally obvious and sacred dichotomy of the living and the dead, a difference embedded in our mentality. The skills for interacting with living things, with feelings, memories and intentions, are utterly different from the techniques for shaping insensitive dead matter... Ancient thinkers theorized that the animating principle that separated the living from the dead was a special kind of substance, a spirit. In the last century biology, mathematics, and related sciences have gathered powerful evidence that the animating principle is not a substance, but a very particular, very complex organization. Such organization was once found only in biological matter, but is now slowly appearing in our most complex machines"

(Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind 111)

That "animating principle" or spirit, is really what it all comes down to. It's the mind portion of the Cartesian mind/body dualism. And it's that dualism that lies at the heart of a lot of the objections to new computational (artificial intelligence) and biotechnologies.

The fears associated with these new technologies have a lot to do with a desire to keep human beings in a special category - one that can't be replicated by humans themselves, in other words, reproduction/production of new human beings should take place without technological intervention. That way that animating principle, spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, can enter the body.

If humans are the ones to create new humans, then they would be responsible for providing that animating principle, spirit or soul, which makes us wonder whether it's appropriate for humans to take on a task that has always been seen to be the province of a divinity, or at the least, Nature. Part of the problem is that we don't know how to make a soul. We doubt whether we can do so. And even if we were to succeed in doing so, how would that make us any different than the countless other species on the earth? If humans are no longer special, then what's it all for?

At least that's how I read some of the arguments against thinking machines. I'm simplifying a bit, and perhaps conflating different arguments, but what it really comes down to is a blurring of the boundaries between human and anything else.



The fear of thinking machines that cross this boundary also strikes me as what's at the heart of fears about zombies (or Anne Rice type vampires, who are imagined to be dead in a traditional sense, reanimated by their inclusion in the vampire species).

Zombies also blur that boundary between human and not-human. After all, many zombie movies ask the question of whether zombies still belong to the human race. Take the questions Fido raises, about whether the enslaved zombies are still human, the echoes of former lives in the zombies of Land of the Dead or the end of Shaun of the Dead, or even the pathos of the Frank's infection and his recognition that in a few short seconds he will become a danger to his daughter in 28 Days Later.

Of course 28 Weeks Later opens tomorrow (the reviews emerging today are mixed at best), which is probably one of the reasons I made the connection between Moravec's discussion of robots and the status of zombies. But zombies also blur the line between human and not-human, just as thinking machines would.

Robots and zombies. A strange mix, but when you think about it, they both share a troubled relationship with humans.

Bad combination

Computers can be frustrating.

People can be frustrating.

People using computers in a way that doesn't work = extra frustrating.

The limitations of our brains

Apparently there is a linear correlation between ape brain size and troop size. In other words, the larger an ape's brain, the larger the size of the troop it naturally forms.*

Interesting.

Extrapolating from the ape data, that means humans would naturally form communities of no more than 200, which seems to actually be the case with self-contained non-hierarchical societies.


Apparently our brains can really only handle tracking that many individual personalities. In small groups, it's possible to know who to trust and who you can't because their reputation develops quickly and everyone knows it. If you've ever lived in a village or small town, you can see that happening quite naturally.

So how do we live in such large societies? Social roles. We've invented institutional roles e.g. priest, policeman, king, teacher, criminal, in order to create a kind of short-hand that allows us to live in such large groups. Instead of having to know thousands of individuals, we just need to know several hundred social functions. Of course we've had to develop a large set of rules and conventions to govern interactions between different groups, but by labelling people according to their position in society, we are able to interact with that many more people.

And of course we can switch from one category to another. And we occupy different social roles in different contexts. But as I think about it, I probably know the personalities of a couple hundred people (at most) but more than that would be overwhelming. Allocating some of the people I interact with to the shorthand of social roles certainly makes it easier to deal with the large groups we live in.

It also makes it easy to forget how many people we really do live with. I know as I go through life, I really only pay attention to the people who I come in contact with. I forget that there are hundreds, or thousands, or even millions, standing in the wings, where I can't see them. They're going through their lives the same way I am - interacting with only a tiny portion of the number of people in a given space.

It's easy to forget that everyone of those apartments in that block is home to at least one person. As I drive by the apartment block, all I see is the building, one of many that I pass on my journey. Trying to imagine all those people in that building, multiplied by all the buildings I might drive past on one short trip to the store would be mindboggling. The numbers alone get large very quickly, let alone trying to imagine personalities to go with all those bodies. No wonder we only attend to a small portion of the population that we interact with. Otherwise we'd spend all our time worrying about social interactions.

Our brains are limited in this capacity to deal with information. Even with external brains like address books, PDAs, or even business card collections, we are often reduced to this kind of short hand to organize all the social interactions we have in a given day. I guess it's not a bad thing, just an interesting human limitation.

*Hans Moravec's Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind p4

Comics

I know I complained about learning all kinds of new software programs a while back, but mostly I was just grousing about having to learn so much in so little time. What I have learned is some pretty cool stuff.

One of the software programs I've been learning is called Comic Book Creator. It's a pretty neat little program that provides templates for creating comic book pages (or whole comic books for that matter) either from stock images, or your own photos or sketches.


We're using the program to create introductions to a series on personal finance for youth. We figured the comic book format might be one way of engaging the young adult user's attention, and the images are accompanied by an audio track featuring the voice of the character who walks user's through each of the modules of the program.

The one on the left is the introduction to the module on employment deductions and benefits.

It's been great fun learning to use the program but I quickly realized that writing a comic book - even if it's with mouse clicks and drag and drop rather than a pen - is a very different kind of writing than anything I've ever done before. And since I never read comics as a kid (only as an adult - yes, I do do a lot of things backwards...) I felt like I didn't have a really good idea of what makes a good comic book.

So I turned to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics for some hints about what makes a good comic. If you have any interest in comics (or graphic novels if you prefer that label), McCloud's book is an excellent read. It's a combination of history, art lesson, reading theory and entertainment. It taught me a lot about what kinds of things work best in comics. I certainly didn't exploit all of them when creating the visuals for our project - I was more concerned about reaching our learning objectives and hitting the points we wanted to in each section - but it was interesting to read how different comics are from literature.

For example, in literature, the more detail one gets, the more one tends to identify with the protagonist, particularly in first person narration. But in comics, McCloud showed that the more detail the artist provides - the more specific the character's features become - the less the reader identifies with the character. It's a case where "everyman" emerges most strongly through a lack of detail, rather than the wealth of detail that usually creates character identification in literature.

I suppose there are some cases where a sparse narrative could create a sense of identification with the character in literature, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. If you think of one, let me know, because there's part of my dissertation that will engage with this question of detail and character association, and I'd hate to have egg on my face about this proposition...

But learning to put together a comic book page has been lots of fun, even if I complain about how much work it's been!

He's back!

It's that time of year again.

Dracula Blogged is starting up again. If you've never read Stoker's novel, or you want to re-read it, the blog format is a really fun way to read it.

If you're bored with Stoker, you can always check out other literature-turned blogs, such as Samuel Pepy's diary. (Again, a very different reading experience than in book format)

The real Computer Monster

This is such an amusing video on so many levels!

The names of each component that cookie monster eats are fabulously idiosyncratic, and the machine's careful inventory of associated costs for each part speaks volumes about the connections between economics and technology.

But mostly it's just fun because it's cookie monster!

Encounters with beasts

Today was the first time I'd gone trail running in several years. In the Boston area, there just aren't very many trails.

Luckily, there's Nose Hill Park. But man! does it have a lot of ups and downs!

When we were first looking for places to live, we looked at one place that was only a few blocks from the park - that would've been really nice. But I live much farther away now. So I have to drive to get to the park now. Today I remembered to bring running gear when I went to the city so I stopped in on the way home.

At a little more than 11 square kilometers, the park dwarfs Central Park in NYC (which is only 3 1/2 square kms), and has the added bonus of no muggers!

There are however plenty of off-leash areas, which is fine most of the time, though at one point I was approached by a dog whose owner was nowhere in sight. It looked friendly, and turned out to be so, but it gave me a moment's pause, especially after reading a story in the paper last week about a jogger who needed stitches after being attacked by two dogs.

I've started carrying my cell phone while running for just that reason (and because I'm a bit of a klutz and you never know when I'll injure myself). In the newspaper article, the woman also had a cell phone with her and called 911, but she was busy enough fending off the animals that she couldn't make her location understood to the dispatcher on the other end. In her case, it was passersby who saw her dilemma and called for the help that arrived.

Maybe it's a bit paranoid, but anytime I encounter a dog not on a leash, I wonder what it will do when it encounters me. I've had several such encounters. Most of the time the dog is uninterested, but I've also had unattended dogs try to play or give chase, and it always gets me wondering what would happen if the dog I encounter doesn't want to play.

But on the trails there were nothing but friendly dogs, and even a couple of white-tailed deer who ran off with their tails held high when I came near. I realized how much I miss the additional challenge that trail running presents.

But boy do my glutes hurt now after all those hills!

Not so sneaky neighbour

I had to giggle at my neighbour's actions a moment ago. I was in the kitchen getting more coffee, when I heard a power tool start up.

Just outside my window, the neighbor was cutting branches off a bush that overgrows from our property onto hers. She cut four or five branches off, bagged them up, looked around, then disappeared back into her garage.

I think she was trying to be sneaky about it.

They did their yardwork this weekend. Several hours of it with various power tools. So why didn't they trim this bush then? I can only assume it was because they didn't want me to know they were trimming it.

Which of course made me laugh, because I really don't care what she does with the branches that overgrow her property. And if she'd bothered to ask, I would've told her to cut away!

Not to mention she wouldn't make a very good spy because she hasn't noticed that for the last eight months we've been living here that I work from home.

But such an example of human folly (silliness?) made me giggle at its absurdity.